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Air (Gollancz S.F.) (Hardcover)

by Geoff Ryman (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Paperback (paperback / softback) £6.99 £5.49 51 used & new from £0.01

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 400 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz (21 July 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0575076976
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575076976
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 4.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 476,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #10 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > R > Ryman, Geoff

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Product Description

VECTOR

"This is a novel you really have to read."

Review

"Ryman's novel is beautifully tragi-comic and filled with memorable characters. Rarer, it's a science fiction book that looks outside of Europe, North America and the cooler parts of Asia to remind us that the future will be lived by all humanity." (Jonathan Wright SFX )

"None of Geoff Ryman's books is quite like another. His richest and best so far, Air is also perhaps his most mature." (Roz Kaveney TIME OUT )

"Ryman weaves a simply engrossing tale of changing love, friendships and enmities. It's a terrific mix of backbiting, SF and even magic realism." (Anthony Brown STARBURST )

"This is a novel you really have to read." (VECTOR )

" 'Air' manages to be a serious mediation on the effects of technology in a Third World context without being patronising; it's a genial comic masterpiece with moments of real poigancy." (John O'Connell TIME OUT CRITICS CHOICE 2005 )

"An exquisite, beautiful, moving, and perfectly-judged fictional marvel. Ryman gets everything right in the novel. It is an unforgettable piece of fiction." (Adam Roberts INFINITY PLUS )

"Combining classic SF imagineering with Ryman's characteristically idiosyncratic take on magic realism." (NEW STATESMAN )
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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
5 star:
 (3)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
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Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, intelligent, gripping, 15 Oct 2006
By Dr. P. J. A. Wicks (London, England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: Air (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
If you're reading this, you already know about the power of the internet. Cast your mind back to before you had it. How did you sort out arguments about which film that actor on TV was in? Where did you get your books from? How did you know how much money was in your bank account? Where did you book your holidays? How on earth did you kill time at work?!?

Now imagine the next stage of the Internet: skipping the computer out altogether. Making the entire wealth of the internet accesible to your brain, for free, all the time.

This is exactly what happens to the last village in the world to go online, Kizuldah, a tiny hamlet in the nation of Karzistan. Imagine a world without telephones and running water suddenly being exposed to such a wealth of information, and you are in the world of Air.

The protagonist, Mae, is an illiterate peasant with lofty aspirations. She sells her services in the village as a "fashion expert", eking a living by making dresses and accompanying the wealthier women into town to get their nails done. Following the arrival of an internet-enabled TV in the village she rapidly figures out that with easy access to information, her services will become surplus to requirements, and so she begins an entrepenurial quest to stay ahead of everyone else. As she progresses in her understanding of the web, she also realises that it will effectively destroy the way of life in which her village has always lived. Then again, she is realistic enough to know that there never was a "golden time", that life was always hard and people always adapted.

This is a great book. The protagonist is astutely observed, the village a well-developed setting, and the sci-fi elements eminently plausible. This is one of those novels I burned through in a couple of days, have put away in my cupboard, and will probably come back to next year just to visit Mae and the others.

It's a book that falls outside staid and tired genres we are all so used to. Whatever kind of book you're looking for, this is the one. See you in Kizuldah.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book, moving story, intelligent plot, 9 Dec 2005
By A Customer
I admit I love Geoff Ryman's work, even though you can never be quite sure what you're going to get with him. This is, I suppose, technically a straightforward science fiction novel in that the mechanism that moves the plot is a speculative expansion of Internet technologies into a sort of technologically created global telepathy. But Ryman's talent is in the way he locates the story in a wonderfully realised world - a distant Asian village - and makes us care about a flawed but fascinating central character, Chung Mae.

Tender, funny, scary, and enormously clever. I really can't recomment this novel highly enough.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Almost coherent, 27 Oct 2006
By Nicholas Whyte (Oud Heverlee, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Air (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
This is a great novel about the changes wrought in our world by the new communications technology. Unlike most such novels, rather than fixating on the technology itself, Ryman looks at what the coming information revolution will mean to ordinary people living ordinary lives. Unlike any other such story I have read, his characters are not teenagers living in Western affluence, but villagers in a fictional Central Asian country, at the intersection of the Turkic and Chinese cultural spheres, in other words about as far from the West as you can culturally get in today's world. I thought it was fascinating and compassionate.

However. Ryman is a proponent of the "mundane science fiction" school and oddly enough the two most problematic elements for me in the book for me were the two most fantastic ones. The physical flood threatening to overwhelm the village threatened to be a rather overstated echo of the metaphorical deluge of the new technology, but I think Ryman just about got away with it in the end. The heroine's bizarre pregnancy, however, just did not work for me.
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